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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cfoe who wrote (8476)	9/15/2000 4:53:08 AM
From: Snowshoe	Respond to of 10309

Jim Seymour on Infiniband As Buzz Lightyear Would Say, To InfiniBand ... and Beyond! By Jim Seymour Special to TheStreet.com 9/14/00 9:50 AM ET Got to clean something up here: In my column two weeks ago, I worried that Brocade (BRCD:Nasdaq - news - boards) was so committed to Fibre Channel connections for storage area networks that it could get blindsided by a move to cheaper Gigabit Ethernet links. A fair number of readers thought I meant Gigabit Ethernet -- let's call it GbE -- was some new, special technology cooked-up just for SANs. Not so. Not nearly so. GbE is just the latest evolutionary step in Ethernet, which has moved from its original 10 megabits per second (Mb/s) to 100 Mb/s, and now to 1,000 Mb/s. GbE is hardly ubiquitous yet, and there are some serious questions about whether we really need 1,000 Mb/s to the desktop -- that is, whether your drop from the network needs to deliver that much networking speed to your desk -- or if we should reserve GbE for network backbones. But no, GbE isn't just for SANs. In fact, if it were, it wouldn't make much sense, since Fibre Channel links are indisputably faster, especially in terms of latency. The possible advantage of GbE connections for SANs is that they use a much cheaper, more standardized, more widely used and understood technology. Many readers asked just whom we should expect to see benefiting from any move to Gigabit Ethernet. My answer to them was simple: all the big networking companies. Just as 100 Mb/s Ethernet has begun to swamp older, slower 10 Mb/s Ethernet products -- resulting oftentimes in dual-standard, auto-switching "10/100" network cards, hubs, etc. -- the Gigabit Ethernet products will expand to become larger and larger, and more profitable, parts of virtually every networking company's lines. If we can go back to SANs for a minute, I want to take this a step further and look beyond any collision between pricey Fibre Channel products and cheaper, more common Gigabit Ethernet connections. The Next Big Thing in SAN links, many believe, will be InfiniBand, a catchy name for a new system of putting a dedicated switch in line with computer connections to get data traffic off the data bus of computers. The technology and the name are compromises among different standards and product names put forward by Intel (INTC:Nasdaq - news - boards), Compaq (CPQ:NYSE - news - boards), Hewlett-Packard (HWP:NYSE - news - boards) and IBM (IBM:NYSE - news - boards). Dell (DELL:Nasdaq - news - boards), Sun Microsystems (SUNW:Nasdaq - news - boards) and others have joined the development effort and committed to using InfiniBand in their product lines. Actually, InfiniBand has far more uses than in tying together servers and SAN storage systems. But SANs will be an early poster child for InfiniBand. Intel and others last month announced they've put $9 million into a start-up, Banderacom (formerly INH Semiconductor), which will focus exclusively on producing chips to drive InfiniBand connections. InfiniBand -- a technology you may not yet have heard much about, but one I promise you will be hearing about -- looks at this point like one of the best-coordinated new tech standards in years. Brocade and Ancor (ANCR:Nasdaq - news - boards), the two leading SAN-connections firms, will certainly be early players in the InfiniBand marketplace as well. Look for switching products from several vendors by the end of 2001. Beyond Banderacom, there will be other opportunities: We already see Mellanox and Crossroads on the horizon, and I'll keep you posted. Remember: You read it here first!